What diabetes costs the U.S. economy: $218bn per year

Diabetes costs the American economy more than $200 billion a year, researchers have discovered.

A total of $218 billion was racked up in 2007, according to Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk A/S.

That figure includes direct medical care costs, from insulin and pills for controlling patients' blood sugar to amputations and hospitalisations, plus indirect costs such as lost productivity, disability and early retirement.

The study estimates costs to society for people known to have Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes at $174.4 billion combined, a total previously reported by Novo Nordisk, the world's top producer of insulin and the maker of diabetes pills such.

The new study adds estimates for people who haven't been diagnosed yet ($18 billion), women who develop diabetes temporarily during pregnancy ($636 million) and those on track to develop diabetes, an increasingly common condition called pre-diabetes ($25 billion).

'Diabetes has not seen a decline or even a plateauing, and the death rate from diabetes continues to rise,' said Dana Haza, senior director of the National Changing Diabetes Program.

'The numbers just keep going higher and higher, and what we want to say is, 'It's time for government and businesses to focus on it,' said Haza, who believes diabetes will be the country's biggest health problem in the future, worsened by the obesity epidemic.

Novo Nordisk is to present the data at a health care conference for corporate executives and then plans to publish a full report in a professional journal.

The calculations are based on numbers from sources including databases on treatment of people with commercial insurance; government health insurance programs for the poor, disabled and elderly; federal public health surveys and other sources.

Andrew Webber, president and chief executive of the National Business Coalition on Health, said the study is the first he's seen estimating diabetes costs.

He praised its inclusion of indirect costs, which 'add up and create such a powerful argument as to why employers need to take this challenge on.'

'This study gives a very persuasive argument to employers to invest in a culture of health in their workforce,' Webber said, calling the worsening diabetes epidemic 'the tsunami that is coming.'

Among people known to have diabetes, the new study estimated $10.5 billion in medical costs and $4.4 billion in indirect costs, or a total of $14.9 billion, for people with Type 1 diabetes, which generally begins in youth and can have a genetic link.Almost 6 per cent of the 17.5 million Americans diagnosed with diabetes have Type 1.

The study estimated $105.7 billion in medical costs and $53.8 billion in indirect costs, totaling $159.5 billion, for people with Type 2 diabetes, previously called adult-onset diabetes because of its link to the bigger waistlines and sedentary lifestyles.